Saturday, July 21, 2012

Chuck Workman - The Source (ASV # 33)

"ASV" in the title here stands for "Annotated Streaming Videos". Scroll down (as we hope you do) on the far right-hand side of your screen, and you'll see "Streaming Video", "Streaming Audio", "Online Essays, Interviews and Articles", etc, etc.

Chuck Workman's, kaleidoscopic, lovingly-made, 1999 documentary, "The Source - The Story of the Beats and the Beat Generation", (the title comes from a throw-away remark by William Burroughs, at the very end of the film) somehow slipped our focus and our annotation, so here, belatedly, it is, (chopped into 7 parts for the purposes of You Tube, but none the worse, we think, for its dismembering - ok, Helen Adam, caught between 5 and 6, gets short shrift, but otherwise.. Workman's episodic collage technique (he is perhaps best known for his compilation film-clips that were traditionally aired at the Academy Awards) is curiously fitting.

Allen begins the film (the first shots have him browsing through his Twelve Trees book) and provides commentary and observation throughout. Here's a brief transcription of some of that commentary, interspersed with (unedited) notes

AG: "In the forties the Bomb dropped, the entire planet was threatened biologically ..was suddenly the realization why are we being intimidated by a bunch of jerks who don’t even know about life? who are they to tell us what we feel and how we’re supposed to behave and why take all that bullshit?"

[sound of the typewriter] "In 1944, three young men, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs met for the first time in New York City. Things were never the same again for them, or for the century" - Columbia University campus - '60's class - On The Road field trip

AG: We weren’t trying to make a social revolution particularly, we were just trying to propose our own souls to ourselves..We felt very close to each other just intuitively but, you know, without any overt sexual thing (except that I was in love with him. I had a crush on him and a crush on everybody)

AG: (to William Burroughs) - "Jack and I went over to investigate your soul. We both really thought you were real interesting, dignified, and weird – but intelligent. Jack said he was the most intelligent man in America"

AG: “Burroughs began exploring Times Square sort of to see the lumpen population. He was interested in the different varieties of the bars. Then he met Herbert Huncke. Huncke was living around Times Square, practically on the street"

Herbert Huncke: ..(they were) rolling down the street with books under their arm.

Allen Ginsberg: We thought you had a kind of secret knowledge.

Herbert Huncke: Just good healthy activity in a way

AG: (in contemporary Times Square) – “We’d pick up some grass, smoke, and observe the phenomena of the red light over the roof cones of the buildings that indicated some kind of apocalyptic, end-of-millennium consciousness

Herbert Huncke: It's all justifications! (laughs) - for what? - for an interesting...

AG: “It was such a schizophrenic distinction between the private world of what everybody knew and talked about, like black culture and tea-head culture of those years, or just sexual culture, gay culture, there were all these marginalized cultures which were never represented in public" - George Stade at Columbia University notes parallels in Abstract Expressionist painting and jazz - Philip Glass on Living Theater, John Cage and Happenings - David Amram (on joy and optimism - and music) -

AG: We were our own audience. I mean Kerouac wrote 7 books, 14 books, before they were published.

Michael Schumacher - George Stade - David Amram

William Burroughs: Allen had these visions, these Blake visions, and he suddenly said, "We're taking over the Universe!"

AG - “When the Sputnik went up.. and he [Herb Caen] said, "Oh, these guys are out-of-this-world – Beat-niks"

on women and sexism in the Beats - Gregory Corso - "Women were pretty much ornaments for men and the Beats and they were the caretakers" (Kyle Roderick, Corso biographer) - Shirley Clarke - "They got away with murder.."

AG: "I don't think we were particularly machismo. Actually, Burroughs and I were queer, very sensitive and literary"

William Burroughs and Gregory Corso remark on women and sexism - more Kerouac footage - “In 1957 with the publication of its most famous work , the scattered scene of writers, musicians, artists, and their friends had a spokesman, and began to be taken a little more seriously by the literary establishment"

AG: "We didn’t expect to be representative folk. We just wanted to represent ourselves and write for heaven..building up treasures in heaven. I think Kerouac despaired of ever having his work published"

Gilbert Millstein, New York Times reviewer of On The Road - Burroughs on Kerouac, the writer - David Amram scat-sings

AG: “Life magazine came around to interview us for an article on the Beat Generation and I thought “Jesus, if they think that we have anything to say, they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel, they must be pretty desperate"

AG: “(Neal) Cassady was a sort of self-taught prison-boy who came to New York to con Kerouac to teach him how to write..His special ting was that he could remember the chain of thought that went before that led up to a moment of conversation

Kesey on Cassady - Allen and Neal at City Lights - Jerry Garcia - more Cassady footage - Johnny Depp continues reading from On The Road - Lawrence Ferlinghetti on City Lights

AG: There was already cultivated a San Francisco Renaissance. There always was an anarchist pacificist anti-Stalinist anti-authoritarian literary bohemian anti-war circle..and that manifested itself in literature, in painting, in bohemian parties, poetry readings.

AG: Rexroth had been invited to organize a reading at the 6 Gallery. He suggested to McClure or myself that we organize it and it fell to me. And Rexroth gave me Gary Snyder's address (Snyder was a student studying Chinese and Japanese Zen)

AG: "(Jack) Kerouac (was) in the audience with Neal Cassady in the audience - [Allen reads from Kerouac's account in Dharma Bums] - images of Robert LaVigne mural etc - Michael McClure: "When Allen read from Howl, we all knew a line had been drawn in the sand" - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

AG: I had a conversation with Rexroth the next day. I said,"Gee, I'm going to be famous in San Francisco..or North Beach! - and he said, "You're going to be famous from bridge to bridge" -

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

AG: "There were a whole series of trials in the late '50's that liberated the word and that meant a whole spiritual liberation after that"

part four- the first approximately two minutes and fifty seconds is John Turturro in the persona of Allen reading (from) Howl - Norman Mailer on Howl

AG: I had no idea that it would be famous. I had no idea that it was of such value to other people. Apparently it was.

Norman Mailer - Michael McClure - "Despite Howl and On The Road, few people in the '50's cared about the Beats. This didn't seem to bother them much. But small unorganized breakthroughs were occurring all over the world"

AG: “Over a series of years from ’53 to ’57, Burroughs sent me the letters with all the chapters, or “routines” of Naked Lunch. And then by ’57, there was so much material that I had and he had that it was time for me to leave San Francisco and work on it with him to shape it into a book. Kerouac had started the typing. We arrived with all the new material, shuffled it around, typed it up.

Burroughs on Naked Lunch - AG: "Burroughs said, “I’m not American Express. If the reader’s asked to take it from Tangiers to Paris in one jump, he’ll have to get there himself"

part five- For the first three minutes and ten seconds, Dennis Hopper reads from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch - Burroughs himself then appears - observations on drugs - "Dear Allen.." (Yage Letters) - Burroughs on drug-taking - Michael McClure reads from his "Peyote Poem" - Ken Kesey ("I would never have written (One Flew Over) The Cuckoo's Nest without LSD") - Gregory Corso on drug-taking ("It was my protector..") - Michael McClure continues with his poem - Timothy Leary - footage of Leary - and

AG: (testifying to government commission) - "If we want to discourage use of LSD for altering or attitudes, we'll have to encourage such changes in our society that no-one will need it to break through the common sympathy - Leary - Michael McClure - Ed Sanders ("It's like everything else in life, you can over-dose on sushi") - "When the '50's ended, to the relief of many) people continued to make fun of the Beats but ironically also began to accept them. The Beat counterculture began to move into the mainstream - Alfred Hitchcock - Rod McKuen - Beat Kitsch - Louis Armstrong - Maynard Krebs - Happy Days - Bob Hope - cartoons AG:“There was kind of a Beatnik craze around the end of the ‘50’s..which became parodied and co-opted. So Gregory Corso went to Paris, Burroughs stayed in Tangiers (and Paris). Kerouac, getting more retired at home after having a great deal of venom and mockery laid on him..Peter Orlovsky and I disappeared into India, basically, went around the world and stayed away for three years and studied something new.

AG: By the time I got back in '63, war was raging already. America, rather than being sort of enlightened by the possibility of some open world, was trying to inflict the Catholic dictator on the Buddhist Vietnamese.

AG: “Our existence is so brief, as we understood it, that it becomes more poignant, more emotionally rich, knowing that it’s like a dream that’s already finished, as Kerouac once said – life is a dream already over

John Sampas (Kerouac's brother-in-law) on Kerouac's death

AG: America by his day was sick, hard-heartedness had taken over, so I would say America broke his heart. You just have to read the reviews of his books in those days (how) he was put down, it was if he was.. knifed.. in the.. and yet he was writing about enthusiasm and delight and he was being treated like some juvenile delinquent

- AG (reading): “He’d already scribed a thousand dreams, a thousand pages of dharma, a million words that sounded like a million ears.. His heart was tender. He’d already died and become “recording angel”

Walter Kronkite tv announcement of Kerouac's death – footage of Kerouac funeral (Billie Holiday soundtrack) – Lowell gravesite hommage (including Allen and Bob Dylan at the gravesite)- back to William Buckley interview ("it was pure in my heart") - Johnny Depp reads Kerouac (from "List of Essentials.." and On The Road) - "By the seventies a new consciousness was part of the culture, a consciousness that the Beats and their followers had significantly helped to define and bring to life" - Jack Nicholson film clip - Gregory Corso

AG (interviewed in the early-mid 70's) - Interviewer: Do you have nostalgia for the 5o's and 60's, Allen?

AG:None at all. It’s more interesting now. It’s always the same, the 50’s, the 60s, the 70’s – same thing as no. It’s eternity all the time so there’s no point having nostalgia for eternity